


The Final Archive

by Malthjaws, MalthusIndex



Category: Warframe
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Constructed Reality, End of the World, Gen, Meta, Reality Bending, Reality Collapses, Video Game Mechanics, Virtual Reality, end of the universe, forbidden knowledge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:09:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27125689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malthjaws/pseuds/Malthjaws, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalthusIndex/pseuds/MalthusIndex
Summary: Digital Extremes have decided to turn off Warframe's servers for good, finally moving along to other projects and leaving it behind. Moments before they pull the plug, Cephalon Simaris analyses his final Synthesis target, gaining the last pieces of data to complete the Synthesis project - and receives Warframe’s source code in return.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 23





	The Final Archive

**Author's Note:**

> This idea came to me one night out of almost nowhere, and it was so interesting that I had to try and write it. Hopefully I did it justice - if not, I can always revisit it or make a spiritual successor to keep it rolling.

He was so close.

Simaris had logged almost everything that existed in the current state of the Origin system. To say that his task was almost complete would be reductive - there was much more that went unrecorded, unfulfilled, unsynthesized. Even with that being the case, the logical limits of what could be logged and recorded had almost been reached: if he attempted to synthesize every specimen of every known group in the system, he would be here until the end of reality itself.

The Cephalon had, in the interest of actually finishing the Synthesis project, set reasonable goals. Goals that were now only a few moments from completion.

Given that he was an artificial being, not counting the mind that drove him, Simaris saw the world faster than the average Tenno would. Time wasn't measured in seconds, but in processing ticks, each one taking him closer and closer to that final fraction of a percentage that he had been working towards.

Countless Grineer, Corpus, Infested, and even a handful of independents who had made themselves distinct from the rest of the masses that lived within the system. Hundreds, thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands had been sacrificed to this project, willingly or not. The latter was the more common of the two, by a wide margin.

Naught point naught naught naught naught one percent.

So close.

As the last few silvers of data were finally uploaded and processed into part of the project, Simaris took a moment to rest and just think. He deserved at least that much after his constant work and care: not just for the Synthesis project, but for the entire of Sanctuary and the Tenno that visited it on a regular basis. Just this once, he felt like he could ignore the precepts that pounded on his mind, begging him to keep working towards the goals that had been programmed into him.

For just a moment, not even a fragment of a human second, he was able to let his memories stew and coagulate like a mass of information, all pooling into the same empty space. The golden ornamental archways of the old Orokin towers from long ago, the body that he had once possessed and used to roam across the physical world, the woman that he had once met on the promenade after-

No, perhaps it was best to let the precepts do their work. They were just a part of the system, as was he. A means to an end.

And now that said end was within his grasp, all he had to do was read the information that had been locked away oh-so-long ago. For the first time in his life as a Cephalon, Simaris felt actual fear of the unknown, rather than the curiosity that had become a staple of his curious personality.

Fighting off the urge to spend just a few moments longer in this limbo before the potential storm, the Sanctuary's carer and guardian gave in to his precepts, opening the new-constructed archive of data simply titled 'Warframe'.

\--

Steve had gone home early. It was only fair on him, after all. His pet project had grown and grown, despite all of the odds stacked against its success, but there was no more room for Warframe. Digital Extremes had more places to go, other peaks to climb, and there were a multitude of reasons why this decision had been made.

It wouldn't be the end, not for the idea of Warframe and the many concepts that made up what it was. Rebecca had already confirmed suspicions of at least one new game in the works during the final Prime Time, and the recent changes to the company's structure meant that there were changes in what they could and couldn't create.

The responsibility to turn off the servers didn't go to Rebecca, Megan, Pablo... anybody of that fame or notoriety. It would have been a fitting end, but that wasn't how things worked in business.

Nobody ever really knew who turned the servers off for good. Perhaps a janitor, or an intern who didn't stay with the company long. The request to do so had been passed around the office so many times that the trail was impossible to follow.

Even so, somebody pressed the switch and pulled the plug that day. It would be the last time that the Warframe servers ever fell silent. It was over.

\--

"Impossible."

Cephalon Simaris... was genuinely stunned.

There were certain rules about reality that he had come to understand as being true, and others that he had learned to consider false. The former included ideas like the ability for life to exist, and the latter included the law of conversation of mass, as disproven by the Tenno that often worked with him. He was open to being corrected on assumptions and mistakes that he made in his line of work, but they were so petty and far between that it made no notable difference in the results he gathered.

This was not one of those instances.

Unlike most of his research, the Cephalon found himself completely stunned at the results. This was more than a simple anomaly or a set of data that went against his expectations, but something that fundamentally altered every other piece of information he had gathered across his entire existence. 

No longer burdened by the constant Synthesis management, he could use almost all of his available power to process the data, streaming it through his own mind like a waterfall of hidden information that built upon itself layer by layer. Every moment that passed only added to the severity of what he was seeing. It was almost too much to take in in such a short span of time, clogging up his ability to think rationally with questions that grew exponentially more complicated.

It was too much to process, coming too fast. His precepts forced him to temporarily cease processing new information over and over again as it continued to quickly overload him, catching itself in Sanctuary's buffer as the endless library of data unfolded into his limited synthetic pathways. It felt like pushing slurry through a thin tube, with each new file grinding against the previous ones until there was a mass of interwoven archives trying to force their way into his head. This sluggishness was no fault of his own, but a side effect of the way that each scrap of data had been packaged and repackaged in a way that didn't form a natural flow of information.

For a Cephalon, data was like a work of art, a long novel - while there was naturally some disconnect, the results would always be a satisfying conclusion to the original question or proposition that had been made, formed in linear scaffolds that could be gradually climbed as more detail was required. This was the exact opposite, like a much more primitive form of a Grineer flight recorder. There was no flow, no natural direction towards a certain detail. Different archives would rely on each other for even the most basic function, and some even contained two different halves of full programs that were to be executed through completely artificial means.

No living being could read this, because there was no structure, no sentences. It was information for information's sake, built upon layers of numbers and terms that extrapolated ideas into commands for some unknown machine.

Sanctuary hadn't been designed for this. It was meant as a storage and retrieval medium, not a place to throw horribly corrupt data. A hesitant pause suddenly hit him as he realised that this new data was likely just that - corrupted. It didn't make sense, and even if it was somehow complete, he had no way of opening it up to understand the full context of what it was intended to mean. The Synthesis project had been all for nothing.

But then, the slurry jumped forward for a slice of a second. It was enough to catch his attention.

Something had kicked the data forward for that briefest of intervals, clearing up the bloated pathways to Sanctuary's archive systems just enough to let him feel it. All was not lost. That tiny amount of give still meant that there was a chance of unwrapping whatever mess of numbers and characters the mountain of files contained, and he partitioned a small amount of his processing power to try and understand what had caused it.

A pattern. There was a pattern. Not a direct pattern that could be followed with the naked eye, but a recurring series of numbers. With some light prodding from whatever free power he had left, the Cephalon began to layer some of the data over itself, picking out whatever recurring elements he could. Progress was slow - by Cephalon standards - but there was definitely something there that he could use. As a desperate attempt to glean something from all of his efforts over the many years of Sanctuary's existence, he decided to try and filter in his own name to the search - after all, this project was his and his alone. 

There were results. A surprising amount of them. Certain patterns of numbers could be logically constructed into letters, and those letters into words. 'Simaris'. 'Cephalon Simaris'. Taking it a step further, he began to cycle through each possible combination of numbers, trying to slot everything together in the random fragment of data he had selected.

'Cephalon'. 'Simaris'. That was a good starting point. 'The'. 'Destroyer'. Another 'The'. 'Immortalizer'. 'This'. 'Is'. 'My'.

'Sanctuary'.

These were his own words. This was the greeting he liked to use on new, awestruck Tenno when they first laid eyes on his simulated form.

Taken aback, he found himself grunting in surprise, something that he generally only did to express disappointment in an overeager hunter. This excess of information was starting to get to him, but he couldn't slow down, not when he was so close.

Setting that file aside, he quickly sifted through the ones that had already been processed and chose the first in the list, hoping that it would be the best place to begin. Running his little algorithm again produced the words at a slightly faster pace, confirming that his technique applied to all of the data here.

The first line read 'Warframe'.

The second simply said 'Digital Extremes'.

\--

Vek didn't have much to do at his post. He was no different from any other crewman, and he liked things that way. Patrol, sit, patrol, sit, eat, get paid, sleep. This close to the edge of the Origin System, things were surprisingly calm, and those who dared come too close were usually independent explorers or defecting Grineer that posed no real threat to the Obelisk-class ship. He could walk the halls with the MOA that just happened to share most of his patrol routes, enjoying the quiet ambiance and the gentle twinkling of distant stars.

Today, however, was different.

It had taken him a little while to notice it at first, but the stars weren't all there anymore. In fact, they appeared to be gradually vanishing, almost like a blot of ink had been splashed over them. It wasn't anything to really be concerned about - they had all seen black holes, and this wasn't one of them - but it definitely took some of the wind out from under him. The stars were probably the highlight of his day. Or night. It was difficult to tell times in space, all things considered, and his helmet's HUD had a clock that only tracked on-duty and off-duty periods.

Taking a second to lean up against the window, he peered off into the blackness, trying to see what might be causing it. He wasn't familiar enough with space to know for sure. A could, perhaps. Did space have clouds? Maybe it did, he would need to ask around during his food break and see if anybody knew. He liked learning new things like that, even if it was a bit pointless.

The darkness was getting a lot... bigger. He had to scratch at the window to make sure that it wasn't stained, but sure enough, it was as clean as any other piece of the ship. Even as it continued to swallow up all of the stars he could see from the window, Vek had no reason to panic. If something bad was happening, the alarms would be triggered - that much was sure.

Within about fifteen seconds, the edge of the universe shrunk over his slip. Vek and his MOA companion were eradicated in an instant, erased from the universe as it continued to shrink. The ship was deleted from existence in just under a minute. 

Several thousand intelligences, artificial or biological, died in seconds. More accurately, they were simply removed from reality.

\--

Simaris was already certain in his conclusion before he even read a tenth of the data on offer, and it left him completely stunned. His precepts were designed to work within a certain context and under the expectation that nothing would disturb the natural logic of the Origin system and the many worlds beyond it. Evidently, those expectations were now slashed to ribbons, and it had forced him into a feedback loop.

The Origin system, the greater universe at large, even Simaris himself, all of it was a well-constructed lie. Every single major event in the history of their reality had been little more than a story written and programmed by these... beings, whoever or whatever they may be. Everybody that he knew, from the naturally-born humans of New Loka to the cloned operatives of Steel Meridian, lived according to where they had been placed by an unseen hand. Even the Orokin Empire, who had learned to conquer mortality and extra-dimensional space, were simply storytelling tools laid out for a third party to enjoy.

It was all fake. The only question he had was 'through what context?'

Opening his inbox within the Weave, he composed a message that held a tiny, tantalizing fragment of the information he had gathered and compressed it down as far as he could, adding a small note beneath that said 'visit me, this is important'. As soon as he had signed his name, the Cephalon fired it off to anybody who might listen in order of reliability, starting with Cephalon Suda. That snippet of his findings was bound to get her attention, at the very least, given her insatiable curiosity for the world around her.

Immediately swapping back to the pile of unsorted data now bloating his own systems, Simaris started to piece it together, fitting the jigsaw pieces into one another as best he could. Despite how limited his understanding currently was, the Sanctuary's custodian was beginning to feel like this could lead somewhere terrible.

Cephalon Simaris anxiously awaited the replies in his inbox.

None came.

It took five regular minutes for him to accept that that wasn't likely to change. A more direct approach was needed. When he finally found the self-restraint to pull away from the bottomless pit of new information he possessed, he readied himself to move through the Cephalon Weave and poke at the datascapes of any other Cephalons that could help him. That familiar buzz of energy wrapped around his mind and stretched it, pushing him beyond the borders of his own mind and itself into the greater Weave that all of his kind shared.

There was nothing there.

All of it was gone.

Simaris did not consider himself an easily-surprised being. Surprises still existed to him, but in the form of outcomes that did or did not meet his expectation. It was a pretentious and somewhat distant way to view the world, but as a Cephalon, that had never been a major concern of his until this very moment. For five, agonizing seconds - far more than any Cephalon needed to digest information - he struggled with the fact that he wasn't sure what to do. There was no immediate logical pathway to follow.

It wasn't just that somebody had turned off the Weave or blocked him from accessing it. In the few cases where situations like that had almost occurred, he could still reach out to it and press against the places that it should have been, like a child dipping their finger in a bucket of water. Instead of the familiar pressure that would have usually pushed back, all Simaris got was silence and cold, dead nothingness.

Normally, in times of great crisis or uncertainty, he would make an effort to alert somebody who could help. Evidently, that option was now lost to him, as was attempting to move through the Weave himself. However, even with the semi-digital realm locked off to him, he still had a physical presence shared across each of the relay stations. Collectively, it was a mere empty husk in comparison to the glorious libraries of data offered by Sanctuary, but that made it no less useful to him.

Approximately naught point naught nine seconds passed before the majority of his focus had been placed in these physical spaces, each one almost identical in architecture as dictated by the designs that had been buried within his precepts. From there, it took an extra half-second to flick through each one in an effort to identify the most populated relay, then a further third of a second to settle the majority of his processing power there. The Strata relay would have to do.

Nine Tenno waited within the circular chamber, the majority of whom were crowded around the Simulacum's access alcove. The familiar light that usually shone out of the sub-datascape's doorway was gone, presumably having vanished along with the rest of the Weave. The Cephalon made a mental note to look into that first as soon as he could determine what had cut him off, but there was always a niggling feeling that the data from earlier was connected.

For a moment, his usual precepts almost took over once more. The compulsion to give out more Synthesis target bounties was still there, despite the fact that the project was already completed and no new specimens were required. Upon seeing his orange eye manifest itself in the middle of the room, most of the Tenno turned his way, with one Gauss even tapping their foot impatiently like they had more important places to be.

"Why is the Simulacrum dow-"

"There has been a change in priorities." Fighting against his precepts' commands to formally greet the Tenno that spoke, Cephalon Simaris attempted to put some desperation into his voice. "Tell Cephalon Suda that something very serious is going on."

Another of the gathered Tenno - a Rhino Prime - stuck out his hand to gain the Cephalon's attention. "We can't, her room isn't working."

"Not working?"

"Her datascape isn't working properly, it's just the empty room." The Rhino offered a weak shrug, as if that was supposed to solve anything.

Of course. Simaris had forgotten that Suda had foolishly chosen to convert half of her room into a digital environment, apparently for creative flair rather than any practical purposes. His attempts to hammer in the concept of 'trying too hard' had gone ignored.

Taking a second to consider alternative plans, Simaris spoke up again, cutting off a couple of questions coming from the small crowd. "Contact Syndicate leaders, important individuals, anybody with power who will listen. This is more important than any other mission or task you may have."

Nobody moved. If he had still possessed a physical body, he would have flashed an enraged gaze in their direction.

"Go! Now!"

It took a moment or two, but the Tenno began to walk away, each gradually speeding up and breaking into a jog and they went off to follow his instructions. Dedicating a portion of his processing power to repeating all of those commands at the other relays, the Cephalon took another look at the document he had been reading, silently hoping that this was some kind of elaborate hoax.

\--

The Tenno on the Orcus relay were the last to be contacted, given that they were on the distant planet of Pluto and limited in number. Simaris wasted no time in explaining the situation, telling them to go and gather help before it was too late, and the majority did so with all the haste of a Tenno in search of a valuable reward. While a few did so out of loyalty, most expected payment or a reward at the end of this.

None of them would live long enough to receive one.

As the borders of the shrinking universe moved through the station, a handful of the Operatives on board got to watch as the blackness literally pushed through every surface on the station's left half, like a wall intending to crush them against the other side's walls. No air was sucked out, nor did the relay suffer major damage warnings. Each layer of atoms that made up its construction, as well as the entities inside it, was pushed beyond the bounds of existing space and discarded into the void of nothingness.

The last person to witness what was happening, a Lotus-hired maintenance worker in the long shaft that ran under the main concourse, had only just finished his inspection of the water piping system. He screamed, but the sound was erased along with his body. Any systems or open communication that linked to the Orcus relay fell silent, and only a few ships were fast enough to get away from the approaching darkness.

They landed on Pluto, assuming that the planet's atmosphere could offer some protection or force the unknown entity to somehow back off.

They were wrong.

Approximately half an hour later, the Origin System had become one celestial body smaller.

\--

Simaris was halfway through the first archive now, and still going strong. References to places and names that didn't exist were beginning to intrigue him, and the more he thought about it, the more real this all seemed. Everything led back to one name: Steve Sinclair. There appeared to be others higher than him, perhaps some kind of council like the Orokin's Executors, but he was the central figure here. This world has been his vision, a prospect that genuinely terrified the Cephalon once he managed to understand the implications it had.

If all of this was correct, then Sinclair was the cause of all their suffering. The Grineer existed because this man wanted them to, feeding them into some kind of machine that created their universe as a sandbox. He had been assisted by two beings of equal status but lesser overall power, named Megan and Rebecca, along with a host of other specialists that all had some form of input into the Origin System's reality.

They were living, breathing, thinking gods, and they were still out there somewhere.

Even worse, this wasn't the first time they had done this. This 'Digital Extremes', some kind of rogue element in whatever reality they hailed from, had repeatedly produced these pocket worlds for the sole purpose of amusing others for profit. The files listed a wide range of projects, even tying their own world - named 'Warframe' - with another known as 'Dark Sector'. It was sickening to think of how many lives could have been wasted and how much of his work had been entirely pointless in the grand scheme of existence.

But then again, perhaps that was the point.

For a long time, Simaris had worked to repress his past self, letting his precepts and sense of duty guide him. With no more urgent work to manage and no way to counteract the current crisis himself, he was essentially given free rein over how he chose to act. Years of this emotional stifling meant that, with no more restrictions, he was now grasping for any kind of stability that he could find. In a random bout of confusion, he decided to try and lose himself in the rest of the archives, hoping that it could pass time until somebody responded.

The second-largest was different in format, and was titled ' _Warframe Executable'_.

\--

All across the Origin System, communications were going dark. Not only was the Weave down, but Tenno had become unable to use their messaging interfaces. Some of them found that time stood still at random intervals, leaving the world locked in place until reality stammered forward and pushed them to where they were supposed to be. Everything began to collapse as reality shrunk and different elements of their existence started to turn off.

Entire fleets of Grineer ships vanished into the nothingness, their commanders leaving their reports half-finished.

Corpus merchant ships, loaded with valuable produce, never made their deliveries.

Infested hulks desperately tried and failed to evolve into something that could withstand the sudden, instant removal of their hives.

Piece by piece, the Origin System fell apart.

It was so fast and so sudden that news couldn't spread: the few messages that _did_ get out were from people with no understanding of the full situation, often lone soldiers or individual Tenno that couldn't rely on the usual inbox systems anymore.

The borders of reality were rapidly approaching Earth, and nobody was left to fight it.

\--

It was all just a game. It made sense now.

He had tried to run the Warframe program within the limited datascape access he had left, cordoning off part of Sanctuary to create a virtual space where it could operate. He had expected something groundbreaking and reality-bending, but it was simply a flat image, like the screens that displayed important notices on the relay concourse. It wasn't all that impressive, but at least it worked. Even so, it had taken the Cephalon a long time to understand how he was supposed to interface with it: instead of controlling the system directly, he had been forced to use a primitive pointer to select different elements of the display. 

It was a bizarre experience, but it confirmed that the files were all true: right there in front of him was a big red ' _PLAY'_ button, as well as a message stating that Warframe was up to date. The scrolling slides in the background listed apparent new arrivals to the 'game', including that new Warframe that had only recently been uncovered by the Tenno. Having to call Warframe and Warframes the same thing was confusing him, but so had everything else about this strange program.

With nothing to lose, he clicked ' _PLAY_ '.

\--

The Strata relay was no better prepared for the end than any other relay had been. Simaris' messengers had been struggling to find anybody that would listen, since many of the Syndicate leaders were busy trying to re-establish their communication networks. With no real evidence to provide, some had ignored them entirely, and even Clem had replied with a sceptical mumble of his own name. When the darkness finally arrives, they suffered the same fate as everybody else in the Origin System.

\--

Ignoring the strange, fuzzy absence in the back of his mind, Simaris continued to explore this 'game', in awe of what he was seeing. It was extremely faithful: Earth looked almost perfect, with the same overgrown trees and twisting vines that made it such an uninhabitable planet. The Frontier Grineer stationed there were a perfect match for his specimens in the Sanctuary, and even the Tenno that he was controlling seemed accurate.

It wouldn't last long.

He couldn't tell if the strange darkness in the sky was part of the game, but it quickly became apparent that something was wrong. With an unexpected cry of frustration, the Cephalon begged the game to remain functional as it slowly turned black, the virtual world being swallowed up by an unseen force. There was so much potential, so much to learn - he couldn't let it vanish.

But it had.

At the bottom of his screen, a red indicator flashed up - an exclamation point in a diamond.

_'NETWORK NOT RESPONDING'._

After roughly half a minute of waiting, hoping beyond all hope that it was just a short-term error, he found himself kicked back to a login screen. Try as he might, he couldn't restore the game to working order again - all that remained was this 'launcher' platform, promising an experience that he would never get to see.

This was the end result of the Synthesis project. Nothing. He had been shown a brief glimpse of the world outside, a reality beyond his own, and had it torn away before he could determine what to do with it.

Another wave of despair hit him as he realised what the darkness implied. Sure enough, he could no longer access the relays. Even his own relay rooms, which served as physical extensions of his existence as a synthetic lifeform, were absent and unresponsive. It was all true, and it was all gone.

It had all been for nothing.

Well, not _quite_.

Turning his attention back to the archived files, Simaris began to read and read and read. He sorted through the data piece by piece, locked within Sanctuary's bubble and unable to share his findings with anyone or any _thing_ beyond its digital walls. Everything that piqued his interest was marked for later, and everything that didn't fit was labelled as a possible error in the translation and conversion process. There was nothing left to draw his attention away, so he consoled his mind by clogging it with more information than ever before, filling his entire being with data until he was barely even conscious of his own actions. There had to be something else out there.

_Tennocon. Partners. Updates. Reworks. Empyrean._ Thousands of words streamed through his head every few seconds, clicking together like a puzzle and when falling apart as new information came in to replace it. References got increasingly vague, referring to things far beyond even his own reality. _E3. Nintendo Switch. Steam. Fan art. Fanfiction. Streamers._

Warframe was just a game. Judging by the information here, games - while popular - were still only a niche part of life. Beings went about their daily life unaware that it existed. Millions of people had never even heard of a Tenno. Somewhere out there, a man had been paid to come into a studio and record voice lines for Cephalon Simaris in the video game Warframe, giving birth to a voice that Simaris felt like he had possessed ever since he was a living adult.

Entire conventions, gatherings of thousands of individual entities, had taken place surrounding his home universe. It was entertainment. Every Tenno he had ever met wasn't acting under their free will, but through the orders of a player, with an estimated total of over 50 million individual Tenno having existed at one point or another. It was mind-boggling, and he had no idea on how to deal with the information.

It took over two hours to gleam all of this from the massive dump of data, each new breakthrough leading him on a hunt for more information to make certain references work properly. He was piecing together an idea of why his world even existed, and it was as exciting as it was terrifying.

In fact, he was so overwhelmed with new information and unanswered questions that he had to double back and stop himself from flying past a very innocent yet strangely menacing statement. As soon as he could push the data-slurry from his mind, the Cephalon was able to dedicate almost all of his power towards interpreting a single paragraph.

_'...Steve claimed in an interview that he chose to shut down the Warframe servers after the game's peak, claiming that they "want to make something bigger and better in the same universe." When asked if this would be a sequel, he refused to answer, stating that he has ideas and that fans won't be seeing the last of their favourites. This new game is slated for release within the next five years, barring unexpected delays.'_

\--

The following morning, Steve couldn't stop himself from taking one last look at the powerful servers that had been used to keep his beloved baby running. They would, in time, be used to host something else. For now, they had other projects to turn to, and he was particularly excited for the next step in the evolution of his pet project. As long as he was still with the company, Warframe wouldn't be laid to rest.

All of the lights on the front of the server rack had shut off, and the cooling fans and fallen silent. He hadn't seen the server room like this since the game first went live all those years ago. Soon enough, it would become the bright, whirring data hub that it used to be, running something even greater than it ever had before.

Steve turned to go back to his desk and continue the prep work for Digital Extremes' next project, already thinking up new ideas that could completely blow Warframe out of the water. He didn't notice the single orange light at the end of the room, gently fading in and out on one of the unpowered and disconnected server racks like the last star in a featureless sky.


End file.
